Do not let that woman near my house!

So, has anybody seen the program Debbie Travis’ Facelift? It’s one of those home makeover shows where the homeowner takes off for a few days and this Debbie person comes in and does a makeover on several rooms of the house.

I don’t know if the problem is that I have some excessively firm ideas about what I like and dislike, or if this woman’s taste and design sensibilities are just disgracefully bad.

I’ve disagreed with a number of her choices over the last couple of weeks, but today’s show just freaked me out. I agree that the house needed some redecorating, but the end result was nothing short of hideous. More than anything, the room just needed some unification of theme and colour…it did not deserve to be savaged.

The lounge walls were replastered with tinted plaster…not a bad idea in itself…but in an overwhelming raspberry pink? Despite the fact that her children said the homeowner liked most all colours except hot pink, that’s what those walls were plastered. Then the beautiful red Persian rug was taken up and replaced with vulgar orange carpet tiles. There was a fireplace with a traditional white surround which was ripped out and replaced with dreadful black painted fake wood. The high ceiling was visually brought down by the installation of faux beams, ruining the lofty airiness of the space. The homeowner had amassed an eclectic collection of exotic furniture pieces, including some graceful carved teak benches that, with cushions, functioned as sofas. They were replaced with low, cheap, backless Indonesian chairs that looked like large footstools. I cannot imagine being able to sit down and relax on those things, for even though cushions had been provided, there was nothing for back support. Ugly brown curtains drooping morosely to the sides of the windows added an appropriately moribund finish to the room.

The kitchen started out as one of those dead-boring spaces of white appliances and white melamine cupboards. The walls were a bright sunny yellow and trimmed in white. While the kitchen did need a change, painting half of it turquoise and the other half a dirty yellow, then trimming the countertop edges with a cheap, tacky metal trim strip reminiscent of a 50s-era greasy spoon, was a less-than-optimal choice. The kitchen island that was added was a nice touch, but the top was varnished wood (edged with that shoddy aluminium strip)…in a wet space that is regularly used by three children…talk about a high maintenance addition! Then, as a final touch, the homeowner was gifted with a new refrigerator…with the door opening the wrong way! For someone whose business it is to mind the details, Miss Debbie sure dropped the ball on that one. Ultimately, the kitchen came out looking badly dated and sadly in need of a makeover.

I have to say, if that woman came into my house and replaced my oriental rugs with tacky carpet tiles, painted my lounge eye-watering pink, replaced furniture I had carefully chosen over the years with cheap Indonesian imports, and ripped out my traditional style wood fireplace surround and replaced it with cheap imitation wood, I would probably just sit down and cry the moment I saw it. “Oh no!” I would moan, “Oh no, how could you?” And God help her if she declared my gorgeous black granite kitchen counters to be passé and then proceeded to replace them with something kitschy…she would not survive to pass judgment on another ill-fated homeowner.

Keep that woman away from my house!

The Unwilling Father

In America it is called "child support" and, according to American law, every child is entitled to support from both of its parents, regardless of whether or not the man wanted to become a father. Now this may sound like a no-brainer, but in the States, it is a bone of great contention.

The issue seems to be that in an age when contraception is pretty much perfected and abortion-on-demand is a woman's right, there need be no unplanned babies born. Therefore, any unplanned pregnancy that results in the birth of a child is done so at the sole behest of the mother, and a man should not be held financially responsible for 18 years for her unilateral decision to give birth.

On the surface that may seem logical, but it seems to me that there are contraceptive devices available to men and a man's failure to use them makes him just as responsible for the resultant pregnancy as the woman. Given, then, that both are equally responsible for creating an unplanned pregnancy, should the man be able to demand the woman have an abortion and, if she refuses, be excused of all paternal responsibility, including the responsibility to support his resulting offspring? The de facto choice to become pregnant was both of theirs, but the choice to remain pregnant is solely hers, after all.

It's a thorny issue...I certainly would not want to have a huge chunk of money sucked out of my wallet every month for the next 18 years as the result of a decision made by someone else, a decision with which I emphatically disagreed. On the other hand, I find the entire concept of forced abortion to be absolutely repugnant. So, should the women who choose to take an unintended pregnancy to term be entitled to support from the baby's father? Or should their unilateral decision be one that leaves them solely responsible for the support of the child?

Personally, I favour the child support. If Dude didn't want to be a daddy, then Dude needed to think ahead and wear a raincoat for the upcoming storm. Failing to use a condom is, in my book, choosing the possibility of fatherhood and all of the responsibilities that go along with it. The fact that abortion is available is, in my opinion, outside the issue...sort of like those word questions in your math exams that threw in extraneous numbers and information to make you think you had more to consider than you really did. If a man can demand that a woman have an abortion or he skates out on child maintenance, then she should be able to make an equally private and repugnant surgical demand on his body...like an infibulation, perhaps, as a reminder of his folly.

There is, I think, no clear or equitable answer for the parents...what seems just to one seems unjust to the other. So I'm going to have to side with the courts...they basically don't care about the adults in the equation, just the best interests of the child, which are obviously served best by more income than less. Papa pays...

Of life and death

Whenever people are feeling vulnerable, when they or someone they know has been a crime victim, or when the crime rate in their area is higher than what they deem to be acceptable, somebody brings up the Death Penalty. If they live in an area that eschews it, they call for its introduction; if they live where the Death Penalty exists, they call for more its more liberal application. Without regard to its efficacy, just application, or ethical/moral implications, the Death Penalty has come to be seen by some as a panacea for whatever criminal ailments are plaguing their society.

Facts, however, do not bear out the intuitive expectation that implementing draconian punishments will automatically result reduced crime. On examination it becomes obvious that such an expectation is actually quite illogical: who commits a crime with the expectation of getting caught? And if you aren’t going to get caught, then what does the prescribed punishment matter?

Interestingly, the reality seems to be exactly opposite what is expected. America is a perfect microcosm in which to study the subject, for each of its 50 states makes its own policy: 38 of the 50 states prescribe the death penalty for certain crimes while 12 states and the District of Columbia proscribe it. Data collected over the past 15 years indicates that the crime rate in death penalty states has not fallen as dramatically as the crime rates in non-death penalty states, indicating that the much-touted deterrent value of capital punishment simply does not exist.
Notes:
· Populations are from the U.S. Census estimates for each year
· Murder rates are from the FBI's "Crime in the United States" and are per 100,000 population.
· The murder rate for the region (death penalty states or non-death penalty states) is the total number of murders in the region divided by the total population (and then multiplied by 100,000)

As indicated in the chart above, as executions increased, non-death penalty states did much better than death penalty states with regard to reducing their murder rates. In 1990, the murder rates in the two groups were a mere 4% apart. A decade later however, the murder rate in the death penalty states was 35% higher than in the non-death penalty states, reaching 37% by 2001. (Source: http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/article.php?scid=12&did=168 )

There is nothing to indicate any causality in the higher murder rates in the death penalty states, but it is clear that if the death penalty did have any effect, it was definitely the opposite of what was expected.

There are those who don’t care whether or not the death penalty has a deterrent effect. Their position is that if a person commits the ultimate crime, they should be subject to the ultimate penalty. The problem in this kind of thinking is that there is presently no way of absolutely knowing whether or not the convicted is, in fact, the actual perpetrator. Jurisprudence is an invention of man, who is inevitably fallible…and so his inventions must be no less fallible than he is. In other words, it is shockingly easy to convict the wrong guy…certainly death penalty advocates do not want innocent people executed?

And yet, some proponents of capital punishment remark that the percentage of executions of innocents must be statistically negligible…and therefore acceptable. But what would their position be if that lonely statistic was a son, a father, a brother? Would such a proponent complacently accept the execution of the son she birthed, the father who loved and guided him, the brother they loved? Or would they rail against the injustice of executing a person they knew to be innocent? How statistically negligible are your loved ones?

A woman once answered that question by saying that the men in her family (women are seldom executed) lived such exemplary lives that they could never be in a position to be wrongly arrested and convicted of a crime. That is probably what went through the mind of Clifford Henry Bowen: despite there being no physical evidence linking him to three murders, and twelve witnesses who placed him more than 450km from the site of the crime, Bowen was convicted and sentenced to death. He spent five years on Death Row until a court overturned his conviction because prosecutors had failed to disclose information about another suspect who resembled Bowen, had greater motive, no alibi, and habitually carried the same gun and unusual ammunition as the murder weapon.

Surely Johnny McMillian had no idea that a murder committed while he was picnicking with friends would land him on Death Row. But that’s what happened…McMillian, a black man, was convicted for the murder of a white woman in a trial that lasted only a day and a half. Three witnesses testified against McMillian and the testimony of multiple witnesses who were with him at the picnic was ignored. A post-conviction investigation by a television show revealed prosecutorial suppression of exculpatory information and perjury by the prosecution’s three witnesses.

The innocent can be…and are…convicted and sentenced to death for crimes. Statistically speaking, in the US, for every eight executions, a Death Row inmate is exonerated and set free. How many of those executed might have been innocent but were unable to prove it before their deaths? This is the major flaw in the pro-death penalty argument: there is no way to accurately insure that the person being put to death is, in fact, the person who committed the crime. And regardless of the statistical insignificance of the execution of innocents, executing your son or father, my brother or uncle, or any else’s family member who is, in actual fact, innocent of a crime, is simply wrong.

Life imprisonment of the innocent may not be just, but at least it is not irrevocable. Peter Limone spent 33 years in prison…originally sentenced to death…for a crime he didn’t commit. Two other men, convicted with him, died during their prison sentence. Limone was eventually exonerated after it was revealed that the FBI had been in possession of exculpatory information at the time of his trial and for the entire term of Limone’s incarceration. Had Limone’s sentence not been commuted to life imprisonment (due to the elimination of the death penalty in his state) he would have been executed long before this evidence was revealed. Limone was released from prison after the evidence came to light. (Go to http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/article.php?scid=6&did=109#100 for 123 examples of death sentences handed down to innocent people.)

Many people have allowed themselves to come to expect the insupportable from their governments: perfect safety. Risk is inherent in a free society, and the only way to remove risk from a society is to remove its freedom as well. People sometimes fail to realize that true freedom includes the freedom to make bad, wrong, anti-social, and even criminal choices. Certainly there must be consequences for making those choices, but the consequences must come after the choice is made and the action is taken, not before, and the consequences must not come at the expense of the basic human rights of the accused, who may not, as we have seen, be guilty as charged. The life and basic rights of any accused must be preserved against the very real possibility that he was not guilty of the crime for which he was convicted.

In matters of life and death, one MUST err on the conservative side.

Happy Valentine's Day!

Today is Valentine’s Day.

So far my day has consisted of sleeping late, getting a pretty pair of yellow gold hoop earrings with tiny white gold filigreed hearts suspended in them, brunch at my favourite café, shoe shopping (nope…didn’t find any I liked), and a trip to the spa where both Hubby and I had a massage and champagne in the Jacuzzi. While all this has been going on, the workmen are busy demolishing my kitchen and putting in some new cupboards, sink, taps, and granite tops. This evening we have reservations at the Five Flies…a Cape Town institution and a restaurant that most certainly deserves its 5-star rating. Life is good…and my husband is a superstar!

On the other side of the coin, however, today I have also endured such dismal service that we left less than a 10% tip (we usually tip much better than that, been nearly run down by people who think their sense of urgency gives them a right to be rude to others who are proceeding at a merely normal pace, got half the spa treatment hubby had planned because somebody wrote down the wrong package and therefore didn’t book enough time for us (waaaah! no pedicure!), and I watched a completely uncontrolled two year old dash through the café, ignoring his mother’s whiney, wimpy pleas for him to return to her side, and cringed when he crashed into the side of a server who was carrying two plates of hot food…thank goodness she was nimble, or she would have spilled scalding soup all over that kid!

I’m trying very hard to focus on the positive aspects of the day, but today seems to be an extension of yesterday’s equally frustrating experiences in having to deal with the inexplicable idiocy of others. Woolies, for some odd reason, has chosen to display racks of clothing in the middle of the walkways, reducing space to barely one person wide. So, as I passed by one of these racks and neared the end, why did this woman with a trolley full of food look me straight in the eye and enter the same narrow corridor I am in? Does she think she can pass right through me? Does she think I can step aside (and through a glass display case) to allow her to pass? Or maybe she thinks I will walk backwards to the end of the rack of clothes, allow her to pass, and then make another assault on the inner sanctum? (not bloody likely!) I stood my ground, looked her directly in the eye, and eventually she backed her trolley out (a distance of a meter or less) and permitted me to exit that very narrow space that she should not have entered until I had exited.

Why do people behave like this? Why did a woman try to crowd onto the lift yesterday when it was clear that at least two people (one with a trolley) wanted to get off? Just how much IQ is necessary to comprehend that if you let someone out of a confined space, there will be more space for you to get in?

Then there are people who seem to think they are being put upon when you expect them to do their job. I’m sorry, but when I tell a waiter I need “a few more minutes” to peruse a menu (because he just gave it to me 37.6 seconds ago), I don’t mean the guy should go on a hike through the Andes before he gets back to me to take my order! And what is with having to hoist a flag and wave it vigorously in order to get your bill? And why, why, why do so few waiters bother to bring you a pen with your credit card slip? Am I supposed to prick my finger with the dirty table knife he neglected to clear away and sign it in blood??

It’s been a stressful couple of days, I’m afraid. I am currently collecting a subscription (weekly issues) from CNA, but they cannot seem to keep their stories/rules straight. First they told me it was every two weeks, and they were sending back my every second issue because I wasn’t coming to collect them. Then, when I back ordered the missing issues, they told me they would call me when they came in…which they did not…which meant some of them went missing. Then they put up a rule (and posted it on the wall) that they would keep the issue for two weeks, then return it to stock. HAH! I went in yesterday (having missed one…and only one…week due to having houseguests) and guess what? They had returned last week’s issue and now I have to backorder it…and wait four to six weeks for it! (Interestingly, the two-week sign is missing from the wall now.) This, after having just caught up and waiting twelve weeks for an issue I missed when I was laid up with my sprained ankle. They have done this to me so many times, I’m just about ready to give up the subscription and assuage my collecting fever some other way.

Still steaming about CNA and hungry (bad combination…my normally long fuse shortens as my blood sugar drops), I decided to soothe my grumpy soul with the ultimate balm…shoe shopping. Since I am currently looking for a pair of simple black leather shoes with mid-height heels, suitable for wearing with a skirted suit, my first thought was Green Cross. My grumpy-meter spiked several points when we found them closed for stock taking in the middle of the evening shopping hours. Canal Walk was packed…crowds surging in and out of stores like shoals of fish swooping through the water…and some dimbulb decides to close the store for inventory? What’s wrong with doing it when the mall is quiet (i.e., while most of the shoppers are at their own jobs?)…what’s wrong with doing it after hours? Why close early while swarms of shoppers…people who just might spend a wad of cash in your store (I spent more than R900 the last time I was in there!)…are jamming the mall?

So, today I’m trying block out the irritations and stresses that seem to be finding me lately like a heat-seeking missile and to focus on Valentine’s Day…the brunch was tasty, even if I did have to wait nearly an hour for it because the waiter’s mind (and body) were missing in action. And while the spa visit wasn’t entirely what we had anticipated, my masseuse was really, really skilled and my back feels more like rubber than wood now! The mess in my kitchen…well, I’ve chose to view it as the harbinger of better things…you can’t make an omelette without breaking an egg, and you can’t transform a kitchen full of water-damaged cupboards and rotting melamine tops into a showplace with a Franke sink and taps and beautiful Rustenberg granite tops without first making one helluva mess!

And my new earrings are beautiful and match a heart-shaped silver filigree necklace Hubby gave me a few years back…and he actually took the whole day off from work in order to spend time with me today…

Yup…the day isn’t over yet, but I’ve no doubt that, on balance, it’s gonna be a terrific day and tonight I’ll climb into my bed with yet another smile on my face…and in my heart.

Observations of the Random Kind...

Ag! Somebody call the WHO…Les Médecins sans Frontières…the CDC! There is a plague upon us! An epidemic! Oh, the humanity…It’s too horrible to contemplate…eeeeeeeeeeeek!!

We’ve had to spend a little time in malls lately and it would appear that summer us upon us here in Cape Town with a vengeance. Saturday was sunburn weather for pale, peaked-looking blondes like me, cabriolet weather for the young and the sporty, like my husband, and execrable taste in clothing weather for half the women over the age of consent.

Each year brings its own examples of trendy new looks which, because of their very trendiness, quickly fade into the realm of tedious and tiresome. This year everybody has a white tiered skirt. Yah, there are a few variations…lace between the tiers, bling on some of them, maybe not white but the same style…three fourths of the female population of Cape Town must own one of these trite…but light and summery…little numbers. Paired with them, invariably, is an ungainly eyesore of a belt, invariably of a contrasting colour, invariably of a weight, texture, size, and style to clash with and simply overwhelm the deliberate delicacy of the dainty summer skirt. Few, if any, of the adherents to this bankrupt notion of style demonstrate any fashion sense in selecting the tops they wear with those charming little skirts, either. Fragile, fluttery little tops with handkerchief-hems or lettuce-edges designed to catch the eye with their airy, ethereal, wispiness and which should pair beautifully with the skirts, are pinioned, overwhelmed and overpowered, by those clunky, clumsy leather and metal atrocities that instantly fatten even the slimmest hips.

But the most egregious offenders are not the young girls who haven’t paraded around in enough fashion disasters to have learned a few embarrassing (and expensive) lessons. They aren’t the twenty-somethings who failed to get the memo about pube-baring pants and bucket-bottom jeans being tacky and entirely too passé. No, the flagrant offenders are those who should, more than anyone else, know better. I am referring to the current plague of Mutton Dressed as Lamb.

I try…I really try…to stifle my urge to make an under-the-breath critical remark when faced with a woman who is definitely old enough to know better but who is running around, just the same, with a bunch of her wrinkly, crinkly parts grossly overexposed. I truly try to not roll my eyes and hiss through my teeth when someone who is well past the first…and second…blush of youth packages her saggy baggy bits in threads specifically designed for the fit, the firm, the young. Even a fit woman past a certain age is collagen-deprived all over her body and while the muscle may, with effort and a private flat at Virgin Active, stay firm, there’s no help for the skin. Yah, you can lift this and inject that, but the plump, moist glowing smoothness of youth inevitably gives way to the thin, fragile, crepey texture of age, no matter what you do…and a helluva lot sooner than most of us…and all of them…want to admit!

My husband is not ordinarily a critical man, particularly where women are concerned, and most especially when it comes to women’s clothes. He follows the age-old male dictum of “less is more” and is not particularly attuned to the nuances of female fashion, but even he has taken notice of the recent upsurge in MDL sightings. “Mouton,” he whispered to me in the queue at the Pick ’n’ Pay the other night, and subtly inclined his head towards a woman browsing the Coke Lite display. From behind…and at a sufficient distance…she could have been taken for being in her mid-to-late twenties.

Long, moussed, teased, highlighted, artfully tousled hair cascaded to mid-back. An long expanse of extraordinarily tanned leg reached from a trendy pair of orange and pink high-heeled sandals upwards to disappear beneath the hem of an extremely short white skirt that was liberally printed with large red rosebuds. A shoestring strap cotton knit lettuce-edged T-shirt, pink layered over orange, completed the ensemble. Even the faulty selection of the clothing…the matching shirt and shoes paired with an “oh, that is soooo wrong!” skirt, bespoke a young woman still getting her fashion bearings. And yet…

There was something too perfect…too packaged…about the whole thing, even from behind. And, sure enough, she turned around and the face, the slight neck wattle, the softened jawline, the dead giveaway aging hands…surely she had borrowed the clothes from the closet of her twenty-something daughter? There were signs of rhinoplasty…the nose didn’t look bad, it just didn’t look real on that face. Was her forehead botoxed or just lifted a bit too much? Too-perky, artificially firm bosoms pushed out the front of the top, creating a prow-like effect. It was all just a bit bizarre!

We really aren’t very critical of the majority of people whom we encounter on our sojourns about the city. Lumpy huisvroue, dressed in calico or jeans and the nearest T-shirt to hand, faces naked as the day they were born, hair yanked back in a knot…these are women who employ no artifice, make no efforts to be anything more than the creature, for good or for ill, who greets them in the bathroom mirror each morning. They make no attempt to join the ranks of the trim and trendy and cannot, therefore, be held accountable to that standard. The young and exuberant, stumbling their way through the ever-changing fashion/fad/trend/style landscape, learning by failing, learning by succeeding, learning by doing…this is a time of individuation, experimentation, learning for the young teen crowd, and they can’t learn without making a few…mostly forgivable…mistakes along the way. (But I am almost compelled to ask, when I see a 13-year-old dressed like a $2 whore, “Where is your mother? What was she thinking, letting you out in public looking like paedophile-bait?”)

Women who dress and groom themselves as if they were the be-all and end-all of fashion, however, who seem to view themselves as, if not trendsetters, at least cutting-edge fashionistas…but who fall desperately short of the mark…these women are a different story altogether. My favourites are the omnivores, the eager fashion omni-victims, those poor, deluded souls who disgorge the contents of their pocketbooks at the first sign of a new trend, whether it suits them or not. My husband, on the other hand, tends to notice those whom we have come to call “fake teenagers”…Mutton Dressed as Lamb. And the malls these past days have been overrun with them!

Last weekend we sat at a café, sipping cold drinks and watching the parade of passersby. There was the one I nicknamed Morticia Addams. Long, inky black hair (sadly, devoid of the suppleness and sheen that denotes natural, healthy colour and condition) with raggedy ends and a white streak emblazoned from one side of her forehead all the way to mid-crown. Long, lean…to the point of unnatural thinness…legs encased first in stiletto heeled boots sporting weapon-like toes, then in skinny black jeans low cut enough to be barely decent. From behind, as she browsed the skimpy summer tops at Mr. Price, she looked like an anorexic teenager, but the face, when she turned around, showed decades of hard living. So did her bared belly. It was deplorable, that toneless expanse of bare flesh, and although I was too far away to actually see the stretch marks themselves, the half-mast nature of her navel…a dead giveaway to another stretch-marked sister…told the tale.

In stark relief were the middle-aged ladies who were comfortable in their skins. Some of them were stout and matronly, dressed in casual slacks and tunic tops that skimmed their ample curves tastefully. Others had maintained the slimness of youth, but had opted for coiffures and fashion that flattered their mature looks: sport casual looks from the likes of Lacoste or the South African version of Liz Claiborne, attractively groomed women who saw no need to cling embarrassingly to a youth long past. Holding hands with their (presumed) husbands and strolling past the shops, the presented an almost poignant counterpoint to the pathetic and desperate aging MDLs that surged around them, tricep wings flapping, crinkled bellies jiggling, hair-extensions obvious to anyone who knows what they are.

It was actually kind of sad, seeing all these women who really are old enough to know better, reduce their self-worth to their tits and asses, to realize that without their youth…or the youth they see in their magic mirrors each morning…they believe themselves to be of diminished worth. Women who accept the stages of their lives, who recognize that age and gravity have a telling effect on us, are so much more attractive than those who cling in panic to a time long-dead. They not only look ridiculous and do themselves as disservice, they teach our daughters that, without youth we have no value, and therefore we must cling to it, claw it to our breasts, damage our skin, carve up our flesh, malnourish our bodies, and make damned fools of ourselves in public…all to maintain an illusion of youth that is immediately dispelled the moment a real teenager hoves into view. Kinda pointless, isn’t it?

And pathetic.

Tempest inna teapot!

Ok, by now everybody has heard about Bad Boy Harry Windsor attending a costume party dressed as one of Rommel’s Afrika Corps. I’m guessing that since the theme of the party was “Colonialists and Natives” and Harry’s girlfriend is from Zimbabwe, he generally thought no further than how cleverly this costume would pay homage to his Africa-born sweetie while keeping with the theme of the party.

Ok…so it was in bad taste, considering that England suffered brutally under the Blitz…which was something that happened when his grandmother was younger than he is now. Hmmm…how emotionally connected are you to the traumas your grandmothers suffered when in their teens? And how mature…and global…was your thinking and decision-making capacity when you were 20? I dunno about you, but I can assure you that the decade of my life surrounding that age was fraught with more poorly taken decisions that wise ones. It is, after all, from our mistakes that we learn (or at least ought to learn!). Those of you who consider that I carry some small amount of wisdom, give a bit thought to how I might have come by it!

I’m not excusing Harry’s faux pas, but rather explaining how such a thing might come about…and how normal it really is. Some people are of the opinion that because he was born a Royal and is third in line to the throne, he should “know better.” Why? Does Royal blood carry some kind of special gene that imbues wisdom beyond one’s years to those in whose veins it flows? Because he went to Eton or whatever bastion of uppercrust education he attended? I dunno…I somehow doubt the British public schools (actually private schools, to you and me) have special classes for princelings that teach them good taste. Maybe he should have learned it from social context like the rest of us do? Ummmm…what does the social context of a kid who grew up with bodyguards around him have to do with you and me? If you really think about it and you take all of the “should have’s” out of it, what you end up with is a twenty year old kid who is behaving like most twenty year old kids who have grown up with too much money and a sense of entitlement (like just about any kid anywhere in the world today whose parents are financially secure). He thought he was going to a private costume party, not a public event, and he thought he was being clever. So did his older brother and his best friend…they hired costumes at the same time Harry hired his and were aware of what he selected and neither one gainsaid him. (The friend hired a costume to attend as Harry’s grandmother, the Queen. I’ve not heard any criticism about that one…)

One of the things that bothers me about this whole debacle isn’t Harry’s poor taste in costumes but rather that he seems to be shaping up as the press’s newest Royal scapegoat, now that “The Duchess of Pork” has assumed a lower public profile, and everything he does is seized upon and reported with the most negative possible twist. He’s just a kid…can these same finger-pointing reporters and tongue-clucking readers point back in time to pristine youths themselves? They never made a poor choice, bad judgment, or embarrassing error? My grandfather, he of the ready aphorism, would tell these people that people who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. Not a one of us is perfect and I’ll bet everyone reading this did or said something when they were around 20 of which they are less than proud today. Harry is making his mistakes, albeit more publicly than most of us do, en route to the wisdom of adulthood…assuming people allow him to make those mistakes and learn from them and don’t hound him into an undeservedly bad reputation that leads him to the “if I’ve got the name, I might as well play the game,” mindset of the perpetual screw-up.

The other thing that bothers me is that party. Young Harry, only 20, is pilloried for making a tasteless choice in costume but I have seen very little criticism of the party theme itself, and no criticism whatsoever of the host of the party, 66-year-old Richard Meade, who is, himself, a minor public figure: he won three Olympic gold medals in the 1968 and 1972 Olympics for equestrian events. That a 66-year-old man had the execrably bad taste to throw a party with the “native and colonial” theme is appalling…that the press should seize on a kid’s costume choice to criticise rather than the incredibly arrogant and insensitive party theme…chosen by someone presumably old enough to know better…is simply inconceivable.

Few would argue that the Nazis were some really bad actors who were responsible for the most murderous decade and a half in the last century…but the British colonial efforts lasted longer and had, I think, more far-reaching negative consequences. I doubt a death toll can ever be counted, but the British Raj saw to the destruction of entire civilizations through the imposition of its own, and committed, if not genocides, certainly massacres that approached that magnitude. Whole nations came under the lash of the Raj…“the sun never sets on the British Empire”…from the wholesale slaughter of the native populations of America where the Brits settled, to the marginalization of the aboriginal people of Australia, from the capture, enslavement and transport of free Africans to the Americas and the Caribbean to the complete assimilation of India’s governmental form and the colonization of Africa, the record of the British colonial effort is far from something worthy of pride. It should have been looked upon with the same kind of shock and horror that a “Nazi and Jew” party would generate in Berlin today, but instead, the press chose to focus on the unfortunate sartorial choice of one 20-year-old young man.

So Harry should have taken the moral high ground and refused to attend? Sorry, but as much as we like to paint the prince as a rebellious, headstrong, bit-between-the-teeth fellow, you have to recognize that the party was thrown by the father of a close friend of his. Mr. Meade was celebrating his 66th and his son’s 22nd birthdays with this party, 400 hundred people saw fit to attend, and if adults and youthful friends alike are attending and apparently finding nothing amiss with the theme…what is the tip-off to Harry? It is easy enough to say that he “should” know better, but when all of the adults around him are giving it the thumbs-up by the very fact of their attendance…some 20-year-old kid is going recognize something is amiss? Doubtful…very doubtful.

So why didn’t the press seize on the tastelessness of Meade’s party theme? Why is it not OK for Harry to inadvertently offend the Jews, but celebrating something that destroyed the lives and cultures of countless Indians, Aboriginal Australians, Africans of multiple heritage, Chinese, and native American and Canadian peoples…all of this is OK? Where is the outrage for these people and their destroyed and plundered histories? …and before anybody starts winding themselves up about the Jews and the Nazi camps, let me state here that my late husband was Jewish and his mother was, as she so delicately put it, “arrested by the Germans,” and spent the majority of the war in a slave labour munitions factory (where she delighted in sabotaging the guns as they assembled them…way to go, Maman!). I’m not saying offending Jewish people and the survivors of the Blitz (or Rommel’s campaigns, for that matter) is OK…what I am saying is that a grown man mocking, even inadvertently, the millions who suffered under British colonialism and whose futures were irrevocably altered as a result, is a far worse act than a thoughtless costuming choice by a kid barely out of his teens.

A little perspective here, people! Please!